While we’re telling jokes:
Q: Why was Noah the greatest investor in the Bible?
He was floating his stock while everyone else was in liquidation.
Yeah, but he only ended up saving a buck or two.
Not a lot of doe.
Since the (serious) answer to this may vary depending on specific religious doctrine, let’s move this to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I think a lot of you guys are talking (mostly) about Catholic doctrine, but the “Jesus Saves” signs are more likely to be associated with religions like Southern Baptist or the more evangelical branches of Christianity. In that sense, I think the meaning is more along the lines of “your personal Savior”. You are “reborn” through your belief in and reliance on Jesus to guide your life away from sinful ways and toward pious ones.
From Eric, in the Discworld series:
It seems a bit of a muddle to me. In Hebrew School I learned that you atoned on Yom Kippur to be written into the book of life for next year - so to an extent the wages of sin were death, since there is no afterlife (until resurrection happens) and no hell. There is a heaven with God and the angels, but it seems sparsely populated.
But in Christianity you have eternal life in heaven or in hell. Maybe hell is less fun (unless you go with Shaw’s hell) but you can’t really say that the wages of sin are death. Unless you also say that the wages of virtue is death also.
I’ve heard some say that being apart from God in hell is like death - but that’s not very convincing.
So, do we die or don’t we?
(And the sinners who live longer and more happily than the believers is another matter entirely.)
Seems to me some get a bigger kick out of counting how many non-Christians are going to hell.
Christian theology, quite frankly, doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The general Christian belief is that Jesus and God are the same being. So you can’t really speak of them as two separate beings. What one of them did was essentially also done by the other.
So Jesus/God sentenced humanity to eternal damnation because the original two humans violated his one rule in the Garden of Eden. And later, Jesus/God arranged to have himself crucified in order to justify Jesus/God changing his mind and forgiving humanity.
Which doesn’t appear to have been necessary. Why did Jesus have to appear in human form? If God decided to appear as Jesus, didn’t that indicate he had already decided to forgive humanity?
So that an already all-knowing god could find out what it means to be human.
Or something like that.
I think the mainstream explanation is that those of us who are living don’t directly experience God. But when we die, we’ll be judged by God and that entails being in God’s presence. And then all of us, even those who didn’t believe during our lifetimes, will see that God truly exists and how magnificent he is. Experiencing God directly will essentially turn all of us into believers.
And then some of us will be told we’re too late. We were supposed to believe in God based on faith alone while we still alive. Believing in him only after we died and saw him directly isn’t good enough to get us into Heaven. So we’re being sent to Hell - which is not a bad place objectively. If we had gone directly to Hell, we’d think it was okay. But having met God and seen how great he is, we now know how much better it would be to be in Heaven with him. The terrible part of existing in Hell is knowing God exists but being separated from him.
Sort of like getting hooked on the best smack in the universe then getting cut off cold turkey, with no chance of getting unhooked for all of eternity?
Lovely.
From what I dimly recall of my own childhood religious education, this all has to do with Adam, Eve, a talking snake, and a magic apple. This wasn’t just any ordinary talking snake, it was a snake that could sell, a snake of such consummate selling skill that, if they had TVs back then, the snake would be flogging kitchen gadgets on late-night infomercials. And what the snake sold Eve was what we would now call “a bill of goods”. If the talking snake hadn’t been so persuasive, or Eve hadn’t been such a gullible moron, or Adam hadn’t been such a naive dumbass, we’d all be in Paradise and wouldn’t need saving. But the talking snake scammed them both into committing Sin, God got pissed off, and we are all guilty by association of something called Original Sin. Why it’s my fault that the first couple on earth were such hopeless simpletons is beyond me, but there it is. Personally, if I ran into a snake in the woods and it started talking and trying to get me to piss off the Creator of the Universe, I’d pick up a large rock and that would be the end of that.
God sacrificed himself to himself in order to save us from himself. Simple as that.
To attempt a serious answer to this, I went back and looked at Chapter 3 (“Salvation”) of Marcus Borg’s book Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power - And How They Can Be Restored.
He says that, for modern Americans, “salvation” (as in “Jesus saves”) is understood as meaning that Jesus saves us from our sins so that we can go to Heaven rather than Hell after we die—and, furthermore, that such a concept of salvation had only negative associations for 80 percent of an intergenerational discussion group he spoke with—but that this is not the main meaning found in the Bible.
For one thing, the term/concept “salvation” appears frequently in the Old Testament without any reference to an afterlife. There, it means liberation from bondage, return from exile, and/or rescue from peril. These meanings continue in the New Testament (in the Gospels and in the letters of Paul), where salvation also has the connotation of transformation (healing, restoring, etc.), both of individuals and of society.
Don’t look for answers to religious questions in straightforward logic. In Norse myth, Odin sacrificed himself to himself in order to get the Runes for Mankind:
That’s the kicker, isn’t it? The Lord could have said, “you’re all saved, because I’m a nice guy.” But He made it much more complicated Why did Jesus have to “die for our sins,” why couldn’t he just have have a bad meal or something for our sins.
“Jesus binge-watched all of the Adam Sandler movies for our sins!!”
Now that’s some sacrifice I can get behind.
The Christian Fall of Man is another example of the common human belief that there was once a lost golden age, and there yet may be another in the future (e.g. Greek Ages of Men, Hindu Yuga cycle). You see it all over the modern world, from fantasy/sci-fi worlds to eco-Romanticism where humans were once in touch with nature, matriarchy, whatever, and the current age represents a perversion of our real selves (similar to some strains of paganism too).
It’s the ultimate form of nostalgia and rose tinted glasses.
‘Being’ does a lot of work here. The formula is: three persons, one essence. When we think about the Trinity we are supposed to neither confound the Persons, nor divide the Essence.
I’ll take the crucifixion, thanks. Even the three days in hell* afterwards.
(*Actual time in hell may vary according to denomination. Please see your pastor for terms and conditions.)